The Man speaks, of new plans for train travel

The number of pop up ads on this site makes it unwatchable.

It's like many UK newpapers (and some US ones, I believe) - you pay to get ad-free reading, or read for free, with ads.

even though I clicked accept ads I didn't get any! Possibly the fiendish settings with the Firefox browser have worked.....

Anyway, this article basically explained why cheap (ie totally uneconomic for operators), through ticketing is not viable and how politicians who commute in from another planet think they can change it. Think about it for a moment, if the software to find all the bargains and then link them in a chain to form a really good deal for every passenger wanting to make a complicated journey between any of the massive number of possible combinations of origin and destination stations (whilst after booking keeping them updated in realtime on problems) was so easy to write, an international ticket company like Trainline or Omio would have done it by now!

Since Britain will not be included in this we can use it as neutral example. We have somewhere around 2550 rail stations on what is called the National Rail network. That means the choice of origin is 2550 and the possible choice of destination is 2549. That means there are 6,499,950 possible combinations - without considering which bits offer a choice of classes. And that doesn't include the option of adding London Underground zones or a few integrated bus routes which would increase that big number by another quarter of a million. Now extrapolate that across the whole of the EU network and work out how powerful and expensive the computer would need to be - and who would pay for it.